Re: st: combining tables

I haven't used TPL even via SAS, having weaned myself off SAS about a
decade ago by writing a suite (or dialect) of Stata commands to do
everything I used to do with SAS. However, this dialect now includes a
language for the mass-production of tables in a Rich Text Format (RTF)
document. (And linked graphs, too, in the same document.) The package to
do this is -rtfutil-, which you can download from SSC, together with the
-listtab- package and a suite of other packages. Users can also use
these packages to produce tables in HTML, TeX and LaTeX, and probably
will also to be able to use it with XML-based block-structured dialects
yet to be invented.

My feedback so far is that (as Daniel says about TPL) this dialect is
difficult for most people to learn in a hurry. However, a recent
reference on using my packages to produce TeX and RTF documents is
Newson (2012).

I hope this helps.
Best wishes
Roger
References

Newson RB. From resultssets to resultstables in Stata. The Stata Journal
2012; 12(2): 191–213. Purchase from

The short answer seems to me to be that most of the activity over the
last decade has come from users.
I think many Stata users would agree that we need "Better tables", but
once you start to talk about details, disagreement about what that
means becomes more prominent.

Surely the fact that SAS humbled itself to adopt the syntax and
semantics of the Table Production Language is a strong indication that
TPL is appropriate way to implement tables in a statistical package.
Other packages are difficult and won't create the tables that are
typically seen in publications. TPL can produce those tables. TPL may be
difficult, but that only because the SAS documentation emphasizes fancy
formatting issues to the near exclusion of explanatory material on the
basic issue of what numbers are being calculated. If Bill Gould wrote 10
pages of explanation, it would be easy for users to create what they
need. To create publication ready photo-perfect pages would take a lot
more explanation, of course.
dan feenberg
NBER